Loose Leaf

A 2D Platformer Story Game

Winner of Best In Show at the Texas Game Jam 2021

Link to itch page!

Background

With the theme of In Between, my team and I immediately began brainstorming about a platformer taking place inside of a book. We tossed around ideas but landed on the player being an actual word that forms as the story progresses. Our focus was to tell a short but simple story about growth and we are proud of the result.

The original plan was to have the player use words and sentences in a novel as platforms to move around the environment, but once someone brought up the idea of words turning into the background we were immediately sold. Although we didn't make a full scale platforming-intensive level, we all agreed that focusing more on dialogue and the NPCs the player interacts with would make it a better experience that was more in scope.

Project Details

  • Development time: 48 Hours

  • Engine: Unity

  • Contribution:

    • Level Design

    • Game Design

    • Programming/Scripting

Screenshots

Documentation

For this game jam we decided to make a design doc to better understand the scope of the game before we started working on it. Some of the ideas didn't quite make it into the final game but we were happy with what we accomplished in the 48 hours. You can see some of our early concept art and how we decided what systems would be included for our minimum viable product.

Postmortem

This game jam was such a great experience, and one of the most polished jam games I've created. Looking back I would have loved to have multiple levels and a longer story, but with our time constraints I think we did the most we could have. This was also a larger team than I'm used to and required more organization and planning to keep everyone on the same page. Having a larger team meant there was more polish and room for cross-collaboration as multiple people could be working together to create the experience we desired.
Overall I loved the dynamic of our team and had a great time listening to demo tracks, sketching out level concepts and testing the controls on a kirby sprite. 10/10 would jam again.